Old-school projector turned digital

Who hasn’t thought about turning a 1950s slide projector into a digital projector? [Matt] did, but unlike most of us, he actually did it.

[Matt]’s friend [Angus] found an old, single-slide, sans-carousel slide projector in the trash. It’s a wonderful piece of ancient technology with a fabric insulated power cord and bakelite lamp socket. This projector was upcycled to the 21st century by adding a 10 Watt LED and a Nokia 1200 LCD.

For the electronics, [Matt] used an ATmega88 microcontroller. There’s an infrared receiver so the remote from an in-car CD player can be used to advance the slides and turn the projector on and off. The LCD is controlled by a bit of bit-banging from the Mega88, using hard-coded images of Che Guevara, Hendrix, Space Invaders and some old-school Macintosh/Lisa icons. Unlike the screen printed t-shirts at American Apparel, Che is the only authentic image in this project; this projector might have been made after Guevara came to prominence.

With a 10 Watt LED, it’s not the brightest projector on the planet and the picture is a little washed out in a bright room. With dim lighting, it’s a very good project even if the images are static.

21 thoughts on “Old-school projector turned digital”

He published the schematics from the CAD package “English”. You probably learned to use this one early on at school; and maybe your parents spoon-fed the package to you. Conversion into other formats should be no great problem once you get the hang of the “English” CAD package.

I did a similar build with a slide projector and a “Pustom” LCD from DX. I used the original bulb though, and the LCD began to warp slightly after watching my treasured Wrath of Kahn VHS the night I completed it. I added some extra cooling and everything was OK after that.

Hey guys, thanks for the comments! Well, I was going to use a good ol’ cock&balls for the test image but quickly googled for something posterised, monochrome & recognisable … So oops, sorry for the Che, I will try to use e.g. Stalin next time. (It was not used out of reverence, but perhaps flippant use is worse? Discuss.) ;)

I did that long long time ago as a challenge with some bachelor friends. In the afternoon, I bet that I would be able to show them a movie on an home made beamer during the evening party. So I took a Carena slide projector and a Casio LCD TV and tried to mary them. By adding watercooling (a glass sandwich with water in between) and a shitload of cooling fans, the monster was operational within 3 hours, making me win the bet. The picture was not really 1080p but it was about 25 years ago ;-)